In a wireless local area network (WLAN), a data frame may be transmitted via a coordinator, such as an access point (AP), or may be directly transmitted based on a peer-to-peer scheme. Transmission performed, via the coordinator, using an up-link or a down-link may compete with another device in a network for a channel and thus, the throughput of the transmission may decrease.
Accordingly, the standard 802.11e may directly transmit a frame using a direct link setup (DLS) mode between devices without using the AP and thus, may increase a channel usage efficiency more than twofold.
Although the DLS mode is used, when a channel condition becomes deficient due to multiple paths in the network, attenuation, interference, and the like, the throughput of a wireless network may decrease, and may not satisfy a case that requires a quality of service (QoS), such as multi-media streaming.
Therefore, when the DLS mode is insufficient, the standard may need to support relaying of the frame using another device in the network, as opposed to using the coordinator. There may be a desire for an addressing method of a new WLAN, for relaying the frame using another device.
When a reservation-based media access control (MAC) scheme that requests and receives a resource from a coordinator is used to more stably transmit the frame, a reservation resource may not need to be classified into a reservation resource that supports relaying and a reservation resource that does not support the relaying.
The reservation resource may indicate a device that requests the resource and a peer device with which the device requesting the resource plans to communicate, and may allow only the indicated devices to perform communication. Accordingly, when a relay, for example, a relay device, receives and transmits a peer-to-peer communication between two devices, the relay may also need to be able to perform transmission and reception of a frame with the two devices in the corresponding reservation resource. Therefore, there is a desire for a method that requests the reservation resource, and allocates the reservation resource to the relay device to perform relaying in the corresponding network.